by ·Comments Off on The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (2020, Edström & Winter)

Some movies are long because they need to be and some just don’t respect our time. This one plays a wobbly three-minute piano song over black with the opening title, and I’m already suspicious. Some guys talk shit over drinks, then piano, farmers, polaroids. People are filmed from a far-off obscure angle with locked-down camera, so I’m not sure if the couple of people organizing these bunches of daikons and talking about past new year holidays have been in the movie before. A guy facing away from us tells a long story about passing an exam when he was 24.

This is what I imagine Oxhide was like:

I made it the length of a normal movie before I started fast-forwarding – that seems fair. I learned that every 100 minutes there’s a chapter break, and there are some good birds (below) in section two. Tayoko’s husband gets sick and dies at the end.

Mark Peranson says I missed out:

Though the process of watching the onset of life’s end yields gut-wrenching moments, some recorded, some reconstructed, it makes little sense to extract one scene from the whole picture, as the film’s ultimate strength lies in its refusal to privilege, well, anything: an image of a tree means as much as a visit to an onsen, three people walking in the dark, a farmer hoeing her land, or a black screen with no image at all, only an intricately composed soundscape (as the quote introducing the film reads, “Until the moment you are dead you can still hear”).

Winter:

We entered into pre-production imagining that the film, in part, would be some sort of portrait of Tayoko and her husband, Junji. He had been diagnosed with a heart ailment and had been given one to two years to live. And so we imagined that some of what we would be filming would end up being their last months together. However, two weeks before we were to begin, Junji suddenly died … In the last year of Junji’s life, there had been tension and arguments in their marriage. The sort of thing that hadn’t much occurred since their first couple of years together. And Tayoko was remorseful that things had ended this way. But in those few days after his death, as she talked to Junji at the shrine set up for him in the house, the facts of her faith were revealed. She knew with certainty that Junji could still see and hear everything she was doing and saying: expressions of love and sorrow and apology. And, in seeing this, what would be the undergirding of the film was revealed. The film, at least in part, could, for Tayoko, be a second chance. A chance to go back, to relive the previous year, and to do the things she wished she’d done with Junji and to say the things she wished she’d said, knowing that he would be watching and listening. Tayoko was moved enough by this proposal that we agreed we’d weave these sorts of moments in throughout the film. To do this, we cast Junji’s childhood friend, Iwahana, to play the role of Junji. And from there we got back to work.

by ·Comments Off on The Movie Orgy (1968, Joe Dante)

Somebody took a season’s worth of MST3K movies and Forbidden Room-ed them together. It keeps starting new stories, cutting them off for something new, then occasionally returning to one in progress, like how I’m currently reading ten books at once. Learned: You Bet Your Life was hilarious. Goofy Vietnam-era song over a mantis attack. Where’d the fake ads for headache pills and baby powder come from? Where’d this “House of the Rising Sun” music video come from?

Elisha!

Once an occasional cult cine-club screening, now this has more lboxd views than Trapped Ashes. I figured from half-understood descriptions that this would be an artless junk montage, but it’s entrancing… if Movie Orgy was a channel you could turn on at will, like Maddin’s Seances on Tubi, I’d hang up the blog and tune in forever. Don’t crowd me, Joe.

by ·Comments Off on “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974, Michael Snow)

An avant-garde sketch comedy omnibus, eyewash color field flashes between segments. My dream is to make a new version of this that isn’t annoying to watch, divide the four hours into eight episodes, and sell it to Criterion Channel as an original series.

Snow has called it a musical comedy, a true “talking picture” in 25 episodes. Most attempts at describing it quote his press notes: “Via the eyes and ears it is a composition aimed at exciting the two halves of the brain into recognition.”

Rosenbaum:

In parts, I find it intriguing; in toto, indigestible. Encyclopedias are useful things to have around, but who wants to plough through from A to Z in a single sitting?

The Episodes (incomplete):

1. guy (Snow) making bird sounds from three angles

Out-of-focus FOCUS card that seems designed to get audiences mad at the projectionist, woman speaks about Rameau on soundtrack.

Credits are read aloud – hey, Chantal is in this. So many credits, some of them fake.

6: Office ventriloquism – these are Jonas Mekas, Marlene Arvan, Harry Gant, and the voice of Tony Janneti.

7: Conversation(?) on an airplane with the camera turned sideways and gradually rotating, cutting after each line, Abbott and Costello academia. This goes on eternally but at least it’s constantly mutating, and the chapter headings (different numbers, usually with a voice announcing “four”) make me chuckle. Gradually pulls out revealing more of its artifice, the lighting, then the director’s script prompts.

8: someone’s hands (Snow’s) play a kitchen sink like a drum (with sink/synch sound), filling it with water to hear the pitch change.

9: A guy reads nonsense words into camera, the picture glitching on each syllable. I think it’s messing with us by dropping in some real words. He takes questions at the end.

10: Four-person table read among cacophony from different playback devices, primarily piano music by Rameau. They start talking in sync with their previously-filmed selves, sometimes their voices cut out, sometimes you have to turn down the TV volume because the cacophony gets too intense. This was Deborah Dobski, Carol Friedlander, Barry Gerson, Babette Mangolte. I didn’t skip ahead during this part, I think I might be immune to annoyance.

11: short one, visual of people riding a bus while voiceover talks about our man-machine future.

12: a group converses in a possibly made-up language while one of them films us watching… aha it was reverse-speak since the scene then plays backwards and flipped L-R with the sound reversed, but due to the sound quality I still can’t tell if they’re speaking English words. One of the two segments with professional actors, the other being #20.

13: A four-person sync-sound mockery in front of a museum diorama… on the soundtrack they’re reading each line all together, while on the visual one of them fake-lip-flaps a repeated pattern, until the film devolves into a stuttering flicker-horror. This one gets so loopy that it’s hard to tell if we’ve reached the between-scenes eyewash or if the scene has reached the limits of pure love and light.

14: Nude couple pissing into mic’d-up buckets, short segment.

15: Long one with a group in a fancy room, first making mouth sounds when a spotlight passes their face, then making sounds collaboratively, trying to emulate a Bob Dylan song heard on tape, lipsyncing “O Canada,” telling jokes, listening to the wall, all in the familiar stop-and-start style from the airplane segment. These are Nam June Paik, Annette Michelson, Bob Cowan, Helene Kaplan, Yoko Orimoto.

16: Hands are manipulating each item on a desk full of objects and a voice is breathlessly narrating the hands’ actions. It seems the voice is seeing what we see and trying to keep up, but then the voice catches up and gets ahead, so it seems the hands are following the voice’s instructions. The voice falls way behind again, with jumpcuts and blackouts in the image.

Short one, a family watches TV, hysterical laughter is heard, a mic faces an empty chair.

18: Girl looks out cabin window and we hear rain but don’t see any, then a rain-streaked glass is added in the foreground to complete the picture, other elements (including the girl) pop on and off. This is Joyce Wieland.

Three people sit awkwardly in a basement while a British comedy routine about religion plays on soundtrack, the picture cutting to a new lighting and pose when the radio show changes lead speaker.

20: People take turns reading lines, quick fades at end of lines to black or a color field or a strumming guitar. More setups and activity here than usual, I feel like the movie has been creating an alphabet Zorns Lemma-style and I haven’t been learning it. Settles into a one shot-per-spoken syllable rhythm, then mutates again, and again – this one has so many variations it’s like the full film in miniature.

Colored gels waved in front of a woman in bed. “Seeing is believing,” or is it? Double-exposure, a skit where some people conjure a bed (with an editing trick), then destroy a table (with a hammer). The only segment to include a hardcore sex scene, whose sound we only hear later as hands play a piano.

Bearded guy (Sitney) talking in profile, explaining that the onscreen numbers have been counting appearances of the word four/for in the movie, but the man splits into alternate versions of himself and jumbles the count.

Short scenes: empty tin/bell ring/snowy car, then credits/corrections/addenda.

from Snow’s notes:

Control of WAVES OF “COHERENCE” necessary. Rhythm continues but certain elements become more sequential then become more varied again … The entire film an “example” of the difficulty (impossibility) of the essentializing-symbolizing reduction involved in the (Platonic) nature of words in relation to experience (object) etc. discussed. The difference between the reduction absolutely necessary to discuss or even describe the experience and the experience. Each is “real” but each is different.

Regina Cornwell in Snow Seen:

Unlike the descriptive, literal, sometimes punning titles of many of Snow’s works which point to themselves, the title “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen appears to function differently. Denis Diderot, philosopher, editor of the Encyclopédie, art critic, theorist of drama as well as author of several plays and other fiction, was a major intellectual figure of the eighteenth century in France. Dennis Young receives thanks because he gave Snow the copy of Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot. Young was at that time a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Wilma Schoen is a pseudonym: schoen the German word for beautiful, Wilma Schoen an anagram for Michael Snow. Jean Philippe Rameau was a contemporary of Bach and Handel who contributed important theoretical writings on harmony, wrote harpsicord music, operas and opera ballets. He was for a time admired by the French intellectual circle which included Diderot, Rousseau and d’Alembert. And he did have a nephew, a would-be musician and somewhat of a ne’er-do-well named Jean-François Rameau.

Sitney, who’s in the movie, calls it “the most comprehensive, and the most impressive, of the serial films of the seventies … The whole rambling film seems organized around a dizzying nexus of polarities which include picture/sound, script/performance, direction/acting, writing/speaking, and above all word/thing. The film opens with an image of the film-maker whistling into a microphone and ends with a brief shot of a snowdrift, so that the work is bracketed by a rebus for Mike … Snow.”

by ·Comments Off on Until the End of the World (1991, Wim Wenders)

Nice thing about the five-hour movie being spread across two discs is it’s an easy way to break it up across two evenings. The down side is my brain played the title U2 song on a loop for the 22 hours between discs. This began Wenders’ U2 era – they also did songs for Faraway, So Close and Beyond the Clouds and The End of Violence, and Bono wrote and produced the awful Million Dollar Hotel, beginning a drought during which WW couldn’t make a decent fiction film until (here’s hoping) 2023.

Sam Neill is our narrator writing a book about what happened after Claire left him. I thought there’d be some play between the real versions of events and the way he writes them, but no, he’s just following the story as we are and typing it up neatly so we don’t get lost. Claire is Solveig Dommartin, star of the two angel movies and Claire Denis’s No Fear, No Die. She takes an abandoned road to avoid a traffic jam and crashes into a couple of thieves with bags full of money, beginning the road movie tradition of accumulating a cast of friendly characters. Next she’ll add tech fugitive William Hurt and original road man Rudiger Vogler as a bounty hunter. In various configurations they travel to Lisbon, Berlin, China, Japan, USA. Across the shabby chaotic cities of nuclear crisis 1999, WW nailed how annoying computer voices and graphics would be in our future.

It’s all very plotty, not a loose hangout piece like the earlier films with Vogler. That’s not a problem, just a different sort of thing, but when they settle down in Australia for part two, it becomes a problem. Hurt (“Trevor”) and Claire gerry their way through the desert clutching the airplane door she’s been handcuffed to, soundtracked by Peter Gabriel. I imagine Rabbit Proof Fence was a reference to this – also imagine that their character names are a shout-out to Stagecoach star Claire Trevor. When they arrive at Hurt’s family tech lab, the brisk travel plot abruptly stops and we get bogged down in the plot of transmitting brainwave images to Hurt’s blind mom Jeanne Moreau. Dad Max von Sydow (my second 1980s von Sydow this month) changes the focus of his project to dream capture, alienating the locals and the viewers. Neill keeps writing as Hurt and Claire lose their sense of waking reality and the movie turns to drug addiction metaphors (she goes through withdrawal when her dream-viewer runs out of battery). The gang starts to fall away and it all peters out, ending with a postscript of Claire taking a zoom call in space. Spotted in the credits: Michael Almereyda, Paulo Branco, Chen Kaige.

The Australia half is almost redeemed by this band:

Chico can dig it:

From the extras: Almereyda tried to write a draft. Wenders very interested in creating and distorting the HD images, a prototype technology at the time, and talks about being a music collector. “That was another reason why the movie had to be so long” – he wrote all his fave musicians asking them to write a futuristic song, thinking most would say no, then ended up with a ton of songs. He wanted an Elvis song he couldn’t have, so “I don’t know how it happened but” David Lynch produced a cover version.

by ·Comments Off on Women Make Film (2018, Mark Cousins)

Massive, forty-part series reviewing many of the things that can be done in (narrative) cinema, and ways to do them, only using films directed by women.

It took us a half-year to get through this… I kept no notes or screenshots, so I’m happy to see a few letterboxd lists collecting the titles we saw clips from.

We had mixed results with the narrators and topics and examples, but it is always nice to learn about movies.

by ·Comments Off on Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021, Adam Curtis)

You had me at “Ayn Rand follower befriends Lee Harvey Oswald and creates parody religion called Discordianism, spreading the Illuminati myth as a prank codenamed Operation Mindfuck, accidentally creating the modern conspiracy theory.” We also trace the fall of the communist revolution (and ALL revolutions), invention of mass electronic surveillance in order to catch the Red Army Faction, how counterculture transformed into consumerism, and of course, flawed and simplified models of human thought and behavior leading to widespread disaster. Kill the cop in your head.

by ·Comments Off on Arabian Nights (2015, Miguel Gomes)

The first twenty minutes of this alternates documentary segments about a shipyard with scenes about murder hornets, then in a reference to the last very long movie I watched this year, the film director runs away (“because I’m stupid and abstraction gives me vertigo”). I remember reading that this project was full of criticisms of Portugal’s economic policies, and that it’s divided into three movies in order to get triple the funding. It has its moments (the rooster legal drama, love triangle portrayed by kids and told through text messages, a naked slap party, a tribute to Ghost Dog, some very good birds), but it’s less fun than the Pasolini – there’s one movie’s worth of stories here stretched over six hours.

The film crew, in trouble:

Rooster on trial for crowing too early:

Text Triangle:

No-Bowels, a woman murderer who becomes a local hero for fooling the cops:

Outdoor trial is crashed by a genie:

The dog Dixie sees its shadow-self:

Pretty finches:

by ·Comments Off on La Flor (2018, Mariano Llinás)

I blocked off late January for Rotterdance, and premiere screening Asako was fantastic, then Belmonte and Rojo were pretty whatever… so I’m looking at the remaining options for the following week… Monos, Happy as Lazzaro… movies I keep hearing are great but don’t look attractive like Private Life and The Souvenir… mass-murder fashion-thing Vox Lux… serious stuff by Loznitsa and Petra Costa… and La Flor is there on the list, the ridiculous outlier which obviously I’m not gonna watch because there isn’t time. So that’s what I watched.

Movie from Argentina, in multiple episodes, with multiple chapters, the whole thing cut into multiple parts which don’t align with the episodes (but do align with the chapters) – it’s complicated. The director helps lighten things up by introducing the project in a prologue, looking into camera without moving his mouth, narrating in voiceover, and drawing his diagram of the film’s structure which landed on the cover of Cinema Scope.

–
Episode 1

Proper b-movie length at 80 minutes, and shot on low-grade video. The audio sounds dry and dubbed, but looks to be in sync. Scientists receive shipment of an ancient mummy, have to babysit it after hours, but one girl (and a black cat) get mummy-cursed, so a psycho-transference specialist comes to help. “I’ll tell you more about it,” she says, as the movie suddenly cuts to episode 2. A Mac OS 9 skype window proves this movie has been in the works for a long time.

Elisa Carricajo = Marcela, lead scientist who is introduced on an awkward date before hectic work day
Laura Paredes = cool, efficient doctor Lucia
Valeria Correa = dazed, cursed, water-guzzling Yani
Pilar Gamboa = mummy-curse specialist Daniela

Dr. Elisa, Dr. Laura:

Mummy-whisperer Pilar:

–
Episode 2

Famous singer Victoria reminisces to her hair-streaked assistant Flavia about Vic’s rocky/successful recording career and personal life with lousy singer Ricky. Out of the blue, Flavia is in a scorpion cult with the secret of eternal youth, but cult leader Elisa Carricajo doesn’t seem to trust her. Andrea “Superbangs” Nigro, a rival singer, has a whole speech about storytelling and protagonists (it’s a monologue-heavy episode) and is present in the recording booth during the very good climactic Victoria song (but why? I spaced out for a while).

Singer Victoria = Pilar = mummy-curse specialist Daniela
Assistant/Confidante/Cultist Flavia = Laura = cool doctor Lucia
Superbangs singer Andrea Nigro = Valeria = cursed Yani
Scorpion cult leader = Elisa = lead scientist Marcela

Nigro:

–
Episode 3

Epic spy drama that starts out fun, tries to pivot to being mournful as everyone appears to be doomed, and takes long sidetracks into backstory. The four lead women are teammates in this one – briefly they were five, until their leader Agent 50 takes out the mole sent by a rival assassin collective led by “Mother.” Both team leaders report to Casterman, a spymaster ordered to kill off his own people. It’s like pulp Oliveira at times – it’s never comedy, but has a delightful heightened quality to it. Multiple narrators of different sexes with different viewpoints, and at one point (not even at an intermission), Llinás stops the episode to show off his storyboards.

Casterman:

Commie-trained mute spy Theresa = Pilar
La Niña, daughter of a legendary soldier = Valeria
La 301, globetrotting assassin = Laura
Agent 50, Ukranian super-spy = Elisa

The promo shot… from L-R: 50, 301, Niña, Dreyfuss, Theresa:

My favorite scene, kidnapped Dreyfuss in the cosmos:

–
Episode 4

After all that narrative drama, this episode is aggressively messing with us. The actresses play “the actresses,” undistinguished and ignored. Llinás introduces them to new producer Violeta in a studio scene of choreographed arguments, then he ditches his production, taking a mobile crew to film trees in bloom with relaxing string music, stopping frequently to write in his notebook. I think it’s a parody of the pretentious filmmaker who has lost his focus/inspiration.

Halfway through, the focus changes, as paranormal investigator Gatto arrives at the site of a mysterious incident, finding the filmmakers’ car high in a tree, the camera and sound crew raving mad, and Llinás missing, having left behind his journals. Gatto calls the La Flor script notes “a load of crap,” gets mixed up with some residents of a psychiatric colony, and follows the director’s tracks through a series of used book stores, as Llinás searches for an old copy of Casanova with a deleted chapter. This all sounds like nonsense, but it comes together beautifully by the end, after seeming like a waste of time for a good while.

“He never refers to any of them in particular, as if the four were a single thing:”

–
Episode 5

“In episode five, the girls don’t appear… at the time we thought it was interesting.” I think it’s the same Guy de Maupassant story that Jean Renoir filmed in the 1930’s. A couple of cool dudes with fake mustaches give horse rides to a whitesuit man and his son, when they’re derailed by a couple of picnicking women, who pair off with the mustache men after whitesuit rides away. This is all capped with an air show, and is a lovely diversion after the long previous section.

–
Episode 6

Heavy organ music and intertitles – the four stars are reunited, but blurred as if shot from behind a dirty screen. Aha, it’s filmed using a camera obscura, a pre-camera device which throws a reverse image through a pinhole. Supposedly the women have escaped from unseen savages and are dodging a giant steampunk insect before returning to their homes. Partially nude and without closeups, they’re finally indistinguishable.

Essential reading: Nick Pinkerton for Reverse Shot and Jordan Cronk’s Cinema Scope feature.